The first weeks decide the outcome
A Turkish tax inspection starts with a commencement record and a request to produce books and documents within a set period. It feels administrative. It is not — it is the moment the inspector forms a view of your company, and almost every assessment we have seen argued later traces back to something produced, or not produced, in those first weeks.
The common failure is not fraud. It is a Turkish entity of a foreign group answering in isolation: sending what was asked for and nothing that explains it, with no one framing why the numbers look the way they do. A management fee without an intercompany agreement, a loan without a rate justification, a foreign-currency valuation without documentation. Each is defensible. None defends itself.
What we do
We take the correspondence. We assemble what has to be produced, in the order and form it should arrive. We write the covering explanations that turn a stack of ledgers into a position — and we tell you plainly, before the inspector does, where you are exposed.
Where the exposure is real, we say so early. Fighting an assessment you will lose costs more than settling it.
The routes out
Turkish procedure gives you more than one exit, and choosing the right one is most of the value.
Pre-assessment settlement (tarhiyat öncesi uzlaşma) — negotiated before the assessment is issued. Often the best route: it takes the penalty off the table and the tax down, and nothing goes on your record as a contested assessment.
Post-assessment settlement (tarhiyat sonrası uzlaşma) — after the assessment, with reductions typically narrower than pre-assessment.
Penalty reduction and prompt payment — mechanical, but only if the deadlines are met.
Litigation — worth it where the point is legal rather than factual, or where the same issue will recur every year and a settlement now concedes it forever.
The choice is not only about this assessment. Settling a transfer pricing point quietly may be cheap this year and expensive for the next five.
Why the same team matters
We defend books we keep. When an inspector asks why an entry was made in March 2023, the answer comes from the people who made it, not from someone reading the file for the first time.
If you are not our client and an inspection has opened, we still take the work — but say so early. A file that arrives after the first production deadline has already lost its cheapest options.